The Emir of Qatar, who is on a three-day state visit, owns large slices of
London and has £50 billion in the bank – but there are clouds on the
horizon. Richard Spencer reports.

This year, a small peninsula jutting out of Saudi Arabia into the Gulf has been the subject of a Chelsea planning row that turned into a constitutional crisis. It has bought Harrods and it has threatened to buy Christie’s. And this week its flamboyantly dressed rulers dined with Her Majesty. If you hadn’t heard of Qatar before, you certainly will have now.

Looking at pictures of the statuesque Emir of Qatar (the emphasis is on the first vowel, by the way), and his even more statuesque wife, they seem perfectly at home in London. There’s a reason for that. His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to give him his full title, owns large parts of it. There’s Harrods, of course, but Qatar also owns significant chunks of other real estate including One Hyde Park Square, a share of Canary Wharf, the Chelsea Barracks development – whose designs the Prince of Wales asked the Emir to alter – and the US Embassy building in Grosvenor Square.

But home is more than buildings: it is about history, relations and community, and on all of these, this country also passes with flying colours.

The emirate’s history started with Britain: it is how it came into being. While many of the Gulf emirates, from Dubai to Kuwait, were once protectorates, the al-Thani family has particular reason to be grateful. The British, always with an eye to making new friends for sound strategic reasons, intervened in the middle of the 19th century in a regional feud involving the ruling family of neighbouring Bahrain. We employed a local merchant to negotiate a settlement. Out of the settlement, somewhat mysteriously, was formed a new statelet; its name was Qatar. The negotiator, one Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, became its ruler. His descendants have run the place ever since.

Hardly surprisingly, the ties with Britain remained strong, even after independence in 1971. Good relations were maintained when, like many Gulf princes, the Emir trained at Sandhurst – always a good place to learn the art of international contact-building, as well as international warfare. He cemented the family’s place in the British establishment by giving his son a traditional public-school education. Because of its record in taking well-connected foreign pupils for whom English was a second language, he chose the West Country school Sherborne for the boy who is now the Crown Prince. The family grew to love the place, nestling amid the hills and honey-coloured hamstone cottages of Dorset. So the Emir did what any self-respecting monarch would do: he paid it to set up a branch back home, and Sherborne School Qatar opened last year.

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Money wasn’t a problem, of course. Qatar has been pretty comfortable for some time, ever since oil was discovered in the 1940s. But the thing that made all the difference to its cash pile – now estimated at well over £50 billion, including the Emir’s personal wealth and the Qatari sovereign wealth fund – was something called the Main Cryogenic Heat Exchanger (MCHE).

Over the past four decades, the ever-improving technology of the MCHE has revolutionised life in Qatar and made Sheikh Hamad a force to be reckoned with. At the start of the 1970s, power, both industrial and political, meant oil. Everyone knew that when you drilled into oilfields, vast amounts of gas were released, but no one really knew what to do with it. It had some local use, pipelined to cookers, but you could hardly send it round the world in tankers, like petrol.

Until the MCHE, that is. The exchangers can cool natural gas to –160C, shrink it, and turn it into liquid. As they became increasingly efficient when they were used on a mass scale, the balance of power suddenly swung in favour of places, such as Qatar, which produced lots of the gas. Huge vats round the world, including two new ones in Milford Haven, now store liquefied Qatari gas.

So while Saudi Arabia may be rich, Qatar is richer, at least per head of population. In fact, Qatar now vies with Luxembourg for the title of richest country per person in the world. And while the Saudi royal family has only recently started to modernise the way it runs its feudal kingdom, Sheikh Hamad – as can perhaps most easily be seen in the person of his ever-present second wife, Sheikha Mozah – has a considerable head-start.

No one is claiming that Qatar is a democracy. The Emir came to power in a rather less than modern way – deposing his father in a coup, while he was away in Switzerland. He still holds the reins of power, but he has followed the lead of the United Arab Emirates in allowing alcohol – within the precincts of posh hotels and the privacy of expats’ homes – and welcoming foreign investment. He set up Al Jazeera, the cable news television channel that has revolutionised the media in the otherwise heavily censored Arab world. On the international stage, too, he has carved out a very unusual position for himself, since his startling accession in 1995.

An unabashed friend of the West, and a traditional Sunni Muslim, he has sought better relations with Iran, arousing much distrust in neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, who fear the rising Shia power to the north-east. His balancing step in the other direction was even more startling – he allowed Israel to open a trade office in 1996, although he closed it again after the Israeli invasion of Gaza last year.

As a result, Qatar has become a debating chamber for some of the region’s most intractable problems: the 2009 ceasefire in Darfur was negotiated here.

Meanwhile Sheikha Mozah, leaving aside her quest to demonstrate that stylish dressing is compatible with the Islamic tradition of covering the hair, has proselytised at home and abroad for women’s education – she married the Emir while still a student at Qatar University. Her high-profile visits abroad contrast with the near-anonymity of fellow royal wives across the Gulf, where photographs of royal weddings often do not even feature the name, let alone the face, of the bride.

For Sheikh Hamad and Sheikha Mozah, it seems things could hardly be rosier – hence the visit to the Queen this week. But while they are doing the self-congratulatory rounds, Qatar may be, even without being fully aware of it, on the brink of its worst crisis since the Emir seized power. Like the other Gulf emirates, its property boom may have overextended itself: its commercial centre, like Dubai’s, is littered with half-finished buildings for which potential occupants are not exactly queuing up.

It has also engendered a certain suspicion among its neighbours, through its friendship with Iran and – though this is rarely mentioned publicly – its television station, whose reporters are rather too eager to question authority for the taste of neighbouring dictatorships and absolute monarchs. “The odd thing,” one diplomat in the region said recently, “is that everyone suddenly seems to hate Qatar.”

The Qataris don’t seem overly worried, though. After all, who needs to be worried about jealous neighbours, when the Queen of England is a close personal friend and you have £50 billion in the bank?